Sudden 50% drop in SERP rankings

[AVman]

Hi,

Our website is well established and has been growing every month until around Jan. 6th 2013. All of sudden our search rankings on Google dropped dramatically (nearly 50%). We getting tens of thousands fewer visitors through search results than normal.

At the same time as the drop (almost to the day) we changed our forum software from Vbulletin3 to Vbulletin4. The forums are on a different subdomain, and our forum developer said there is no way the change would affect the main site. Is that true?

So  far, we have not been able to figure out what caused the sudden change. Maybe a Google update?

[AVman]

Thanks for helping out!

Yes, this just started after the change. The forums never outranked the editorial site in the past. We would rather have the editorial site rank better.

As for the content scraper, the site is down but still shows in Google results. I tried to submit pages manually for removal, which works, but they copied thousands of pages.

[StreamlineMetrics]

I'm intrigued by what could be the cause of the drop in organic traffic to the main site, so I tried searching for some of your reviews, and 99% of the time, the forum thread ranked much higher than the review on the editorial site as you mentioned. Did this only start being the case after January 6th, 2013?

Also, I found this on your forum - http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/steam-vent/85061-audioholics-content-stolen-fake-website-mtxaudioseries-com.html. What are the latest developments?

[StreamlineMetrics]

Have you seen a change in organic traffic to the forums since the software upgrade? Perhaps the decrease in organic traffic to the main site is a result of the forums seeing an increase in rankings/traffic by overtaking the main site in the search results due to upgrading the software. Just a guess though since we don't have access to any of the analytics data.

[EGOL]

So... did the forum traffic drop... or did the website traffic drop.... and if the website traffic dropped was it traffic from the forum that disappeared.

You have access to the analytics.   Study your analytics to see what traffic dropped (referrer and landing pages), what did not drop (referrer and landing pages), and if engagement (average number of views per visitor) changed.

We can only guess from here.

Note that I used the word "study" instead of  "look at".   Spend some time with the analytics until you understand the changes in traffic patterns.   You will not have a good answer to your question without this information.

Tell us the story.

[AVman]

The editorial site: audioholics.com

the forum: http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/forum.php

I think tracking date is correct since Alexa also shows a drop and now the forums are beating the editorial site in SEO for the first time.  When we post a review we also post a related forum thread for that review.  The thread is outranking our editorial site in Google.

thanks.

[StreamlineMetrics]

Can you share the URL(s)? If the drop occurred on the same day of the forum software upgrade, then that is more than likely to be the primary cause, but there's really no way to determine that without seeing the site.

There's also the possibility that the Google Analytics or other tracking codes were not installed on every single page of the new templates, which means your traffic may not have actually dropped but rather you are not capturing all of the data.